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About the Author

Ai (1947-2010) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Vice. In 2009 she was named a United States Artist Ford Fellow. She was a professor at Oklahoma State University.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

TWENTY-YEAR MARRIAGE

You keep me waiting in a truck with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch, while you piss against the south side of a tree. Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight. That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows and the seat, one fake leather thigh, pressed close to mine is cold. I'm the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago, but get inside me, start the engine; you'll have the strength, the will to move. I'll pull, you push, we'll tear each other in half. Come on, baby, lay me down on my back. Pretend you don't owe me a thing and maybe we'll roll out of here, leaving the past stacked up behind us; old newspapers nobody's ever got to read again.

ABORTION

Coming home, I find you still in bed, but when I pull back the blanket, I see your stomach is flat as an iron. You've done it, as you warned me you would and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper for me to look at. My son. Woman, loving you no matter what you do, what can I say, except that I've heard the poor have no children, just small people and there is room only for one man in this house.

THE COUNTRY MIDWIFE: A DAY

I bend over the woman. This is the third time between abortions. I dip a towel into a bucket of hot water and catch the first bit of blood, as the blue-pink dome of a head breaks through. A scraggy, redchild comes out of her into my hands like warehouse ice sliding down the chute.

It's done, the stink of birth, Old Grizzly rears up on his hind legs in front of me and I want to go outside, but the air smells the same there too. The woman's left eye twitches and beneath her, a stain as orange as sunrise spreads over the sheet. I lift my short, blunt fingers to my face and I let her bleed, Lord, I let her bleed.

CRUELTY

The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat gleam in the dark. You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch. That won't work either. Drinking ice water hasn't, nor having the bedsprings snap fingers to help us keep rhythm. I've never once felt anything that might get close. Can't you see? The thing I want most is hard, running toward my own teeth and it bites back.

THE TENANT FARMER

Hailstones puncture the ground, as I sit at the table, rubbing a fork. My woman slides a knife across her lips, then lays it beside a cup of water. Each day she bites another notch in her thumb and I pretend relief is coming as the smooth black tire, Earth, wheels around the sun without its patch of topsoil and my mouth speaks: wheat, barley, red cabbage, roll on home to Jesus, it's too late now you're dead.

WHY CAN'T I LEAVE YOU?

You stand behind the old black mare, dressed as always in that red shirt, stained from sweat, the crying of the armpits, that will not stop for anything, stroking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted. I pick up my suitcase and set it down, as I try to leave you again. I smooth the hair back from your forehead. I think with your laziness and the drought too, you'll be needing my help more than ever. You take my hands, I nod and go to the house to unpack, having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip for you to take off, because you like that and when you come in, you pull down the straps and I unbutton your shirt. I know we can't give each other any more or any less than what we have. There is safety in that, so much that I can never get past the packing, the begging you to please, if I can't make you happy, come close between my thighs and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

I HAVE GOT TO STOP LOVING YOU SO I HAVE KILLED MY BLACK GOAT

His kidney floats in a bowl, a beige, flat fish, around whom parasites, slices of lemon, break through the surface of hot broth, then sink below, as I bend, face down in the steam, breathing in. I hear this will cure anything.

When I am finished, I walk up to him. He hangs from a short wooden post, tongue stuck out of his mouth, tasting the hay-flavored air. A bib of flies gather at his throat and further down, where he is open and bare of all his organs, I put my hand in, stroke him once, then taking it out, look at the sky. The stormclouds there break open and raindrops, yellow as black cats' eyes, come down each a tiny river, hateful and alone.

Wishing I could get out of this alive, I hug myself. It is hard to remember if he suffered much.

Editorial Reviews

Ais poems provide an absorbing, gritty anatomy of desire you cannot satisfy. In this selection of 18 new poems and 58 from five previous books published from 1973 to 1993, agents of emotional and mental abuse describe horrific journeys into malice and the old fear. Transfigured by desire, speakers (a heroin addict, a paparazzo, a racist) who take extreme measures try to unravel the strands of equivocal motivation. What I always wanted/ was release from my own pain/ but theres only the terrible surrender to it, confesses the police officer who committed suicide before he was to receive a medal for rescuing people after the Oklahoma City bombing. Ais willingness to explore moral values in collision shines into the hearts of those doomed to be crushed. In Ice and Rwanda, she highlights the dignity and suffering of ordinary women, victims of inexplicable violence. Redemptive empathy transforms these unadorned narratives into documents that reveal the intense disintegration of body and soul. Richly rewarding, but not for the squeamish.Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Vice: New and Selected Poems 3.5 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
2 reviews.

plenilune on LibraryThing

1 days ago

Ai is the master of persona poetry. I prefer the work in Vice that comes from her earlier collections. It is blunt, bold, and true to each persona. In the latter works, she uses more rhyme, mainly of the internal and slant varieties, that to me feels disingenuous with both the subject matter and the speaker. A possible exception to that is in the poem (and forgive me if I don't have this title exactly right as I don't have the book in front of me) "Paparazzi" where it works to light-speed staccato effect. Overall a stunning collection demonstrative of a stunning (and missed!) talent.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

winning the national book award alone is good enough reason to pick this collection up. 'Child Beater' is another. Ai's early poems are without a doubt her best work. as she got older, her poems just lost most of the skill she exhibited in her earlier collection.

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